Uranus as seen by Hubble in 2005, shown in approximate orientation to the plane of its orbit.
If you want to get a feel for how utterly dishonest creationist arguments can be, look no further than Mr. Hovind and the Professor. It’s a spiel told by creationist nutbag Kent Hovind AKA Dr. Dino where he purportedly confounds a nameless scientist by pointing out that some planets and moon rotate backward. Hovind says since “Evolutionists claim the whole universe came from a single spinning dot that blew up,” and therefore any planets or moons, such as Uranus or Triton, going backward would defy the conservation of angular momentum. Thus, evolution is wrong.
Last I heard Hovind was doing time and it’s unlikely he’s open to evidence contradicting his little diatribe anyway. Nonetheless, such evidence exists and more is being gathered all the time:
Uranus is a real oddball in our solar system. Its spin axis is tilted by a whopping 98 degrees, meaning it essentially spins on its side. No other planet has anywhere near such a tilt. Jupiter is tilted by 3 degrees, for example, and Earth by 23 degrees. Scientists have long suspected that some manner of violent impact knocked Uranus off kilter. The accepted wisdom had been that a single object several times more massive than Earth did the damage, slamming into Uranus long ago, researchers said.
I heard him doing this schtick in person and with powerpoint slides. The slides themselves rebutted him (though the audience, in a Christian church in a backwards town in California) wasn’t sharp enough to spot it.
It seems Hovind thinks Velikovsky constitutes “accepted wisdom,” too.
I think there’s a reason why these wingnuts always conflate biology (evolution) and cosmology (big bang theory). It’s because in religion they are one and the same story, the creation myth, with one and the same cause, god. They project their version of the story on science’s version and merge the two theories into one.
Hovind: “Evolutionists claim the whole universe came from a single spinning dot that blew up.”
Um, the main problem with that isn’t Uranus. It’s that evolution says nothing about the origin of the universe.
He cannot even keep his sciences straight.
(Cool article on Uranus, though!)
Also I don’t believe anyone claimed the big bang singularity was spinning. Relative to WHAT?
Just think how long it might take to unravel all that crap. It was this argument in part that gave rise to the Hovind scale of deception, and this argument is one of the few that earns a full 1000 milli-Hovinds on that scale.
Conservation of angular momentum doesn’t mean everything spins the same way. It means that if you add up the angular momentum of everything with respect to some axis, the total stays the same.
It’s just like ordinary conservation of momentum. Certainly Mr. Hovind isn’t under the impression that everything is doomed to forever move in the same direction?
Creationists always conflate natural selection, abiogenesis, and cosmology under the heading of “evolution” because in their minds, it’s all one conspiracy to keep gawd out of our schools.
This one has so many onion layers of stupid that it’s almost impossible to unpack. Even if we assume that cosmology and evolution are one and the same. And, even if we assume that the Big Bang was preceded by a singularity spinning relative to some imaginary universal frame of reference. And even if we assume that the entire universe continues to spin. And that the Milky Way Galaxy spins relative this same imaginary frame of reference, none of that has a tinker’s damn to do with how the gas cloud out of which our solar system formed was rotating relative to the galaxy or how this has influenced the rotational axes of any of the planets.
Arguing with Hovind over science is about as effective as arguing nutrition with a celebrity paid to peddle Cocoa-cola. They might agree with you, but they’re still going to read their lines.
Go ask Ed Brayton what his experience with Hovind has been. I bet he’ll say he’s had root canals that were more rewarding.
Nah, I don’t think Hovind is faking it. He’s true believer. He just doesn’t care what the evidence says, which is why he so freely distorts it. And I’ve never had a root canal, but I doubt it would find it as amusing as I do watching Hovind.
Hovind in prison, this is just too easy.
Hovind has a Professor? Does he also have a skipper, a gilligan, a ginger, a mary ann, a millionaire & his wife? After all he seems determined to live in a fantasy, he might as well have the whole cast
I’m intrigued to know where Kent found out that some planets rotate backwards, if he’s so sure that the scientists are wrong. Because I thought – stop me if I’m getting this wrong – that it is scientists who discovered this.
Why doesn’t his head explode from the advanced FAIL?